COMMENT | The year 2021 was another year of disruption, uncertainty, and tragedy. Naturally, we are hoping that 2022 will be the year that things start to turn around on many fronts.

There are encouraging signs that suggest the pandemic may have very few truly unprecedented tricks left to throw at us at this point.

Throughout the long pandemic summer, we have seen how negatively a system-wide disruption can affect the most vulnerable among us, and how brittle our global economy can be.

It has also laid bare the brutality of global inequality, which we continue to see through vaccine inequity between the Global North and the Global South, higher mortality rates for ‘essential workers’ while the richest quartiles of society have not only emerged unscathed but are also somehow richer than before.

Anyone who’s managed to pull through the worst of the past two turbulent years, scarred but surviving, should count themselves as being very lucky.

Here at home, we have also...